Atlanta Braves minors: End of season recap for the 2019 Rome Braves
By Clint Manry
An end-of-season recap covering all seven Atlanta Braves minor league teams from the 2019 season: Rome Braves.
In this series I will cover each of the seven Atlanta Braves minor league levels, evaluating each club and its top performers.
If you’re interested in jumping to previous recaps:
We’ve made it to the Atlanta Braves full-season minor league clubs, where we’ll start to assess some of the organization’s most prized talent. Today we’ll start with the Atlanta Braves Single-A team, the Rome Braves, who finished their 2019 season on September 2.
The team
The Rome Braves finished with an overall record of 65-74, stemming from a 30-39 first-half record and a 35-35 second-half finish.
The team’s improvements in the second half of the season (especially in the early going) put them in the playoff hunt for a bit, but middling play at the end of the season resulted in a 4th-place finish in the Southern division of the South Atlantic League.
Rome finished as an interesting team on offense, wielding a lineup that had no problem racking up hits (1st in the league) and scoring runs (4th), but finished with the lowest team-home run total in the 14-team league:
Carrying a team-batting average of .249 (3rd), Rome finished in the top-5 in all three slash-stats, getting on base at a .326 clip (t-2nd) and slugging .361 (5th).
Like the offense, Rome’s pitching featured some extreme characteristics.
The team’s pitching staff finished with the 4th-lowest ERA (3.38) and home runs allowed total (77), but was dead-last in strikeouts, finishing with 1,048 punch outs (7.93 K/9) — 83 fewer than the next best team.
Rome was average in terms of walks (7th), sporting a walk-rate of 3.22 BB/9 as a team, or 426 free passes in 1,188.2 innings-pitched.
After covering the Atlanta Braves rookie clubs, we’ve seen some high unearned-run totals, but Rome takes the cake so far, having allowed 113 unearned runs during the 2019 season. I don’t remember Rome’s defense being noticeably bad, but the numbers don’t lie.
- 3B, Brendan Venter: 9 errors (.932 FLD%)
- SS, Carlos Paraguate: 14 errors (.954 FLD%)
- LF, Jeremy Fernandez: 7 errors (.938 FLD%)
These numbers are for the position listed specifically. These players played other positions as well.
For reference, the Atlanta Braves are sitting at +66 in terms of unearned runs over earned runs (through Sunday, Sept. 8).